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New Project From EPIC Surveys State Privacy Laws

While there has been heightened public awareness of the law
of privacy in recent years, much of the debate has focused on federal law and
policy to the exclusion of the states. But state laws can provide civil
liberties protections above and beyond the baseline guarantees of the U.S.
Constitution, and in privacy law, as in many other areas, a state can provide
what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called a “laboratory” for “novel
social and economic experiments.”

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has taken
those words of Justice Brandeis to heart with its new State Policy project, which tracks
developments in privacy law among the states. The project’s website provides resources
on state law in a number of issue areas: student privacy; drones and UAVs;
consumer data security; data breach notification; location privacy; genetic
privacy; the right to be forgotten; and auto black boxes (EDRs). In each issue
area, EPIC also highlights what it calls an “exemplary law,” such as the Florida Information
Protection Act, which provides strong consumer data protection, or an Oregon law that limits the use
of drones for surveillance in law enforcement.

For more on EPIC and its mission, see the website’s “About EPIC” page.

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